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In any assessment and understanding of Belarus, the key questions to address include: Why has Belarus apparently rejected independence under its first president, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, and sought a union with Russia? Why has the government rejected democracy, infringed on the human rights of its citizens and fundamentally altered its constitution in favor of presidential authority? Has the country made any progress toward market reforms? How have Russia and the West responded to the actions of Belarus? And what is the future likely to hold for its ten million citizens? The author's conclusions are optimistic. Belarus, he believes, will survive into the twenty-first century, but as a Eurasian rather than a European state. ... Read more

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Russian domestic politics has long been both labyrinthine and pragmatic, at once both inordinately complex and breathtakingly dynamic. The same can be said of Russia's foreign policy, in particular in relations with former Soviet republics. Any study of Russian foreign policy comes back to the intriguing question of why Russia, long perceived as an inveterate imperial power, would refuse to take back a handsome portion of its former empire - a portion that offers a bridge to Europe and an advantageous geostrategic position. Despite formal declarations, Russia has made little progress in achieving union with its ex-Soviet neighbour, Belarus. Linking Russia's foreign policy to its domestic politics, Alex Danilovich clarifies this paradox and explains why specific attempts to reunify Russia and Belarus failed, contrary to the desires of significant forces on both sides and to certain theory-based expectations. ... Read more

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Anatoly Kulik and Susanna Pshizova have compiled an engaging and comprehensive, cross-national study that explores the stormy political developments in the post-Soviet countries. They gathered essays regarding the formation of the various new democratic institutions of Russia, the Baltic States, the Slavic States, and Moldova. The contributors are all distinguished scholars indigenous to their areas of focus; consequently, they are able to provide a true insider's perspective of the political climates of their respective lands. Kulik and Pshizova have organized the studies into seven generously detailed, nation-specific chapters that permit readers to see the individual party systems in both their sub-regional contexts as well as in their national ones.

The Newly Independent States that appeared after the collapse of the Soviet Union faced the necessity of creating their own democratic political systems in the first months of independence.While each state had the same basic task and came out of roughly the same background, each country implemented its own methods of government rule: they each pursued different paths with different outcomes. It is logical to view and study the states as a group, but also necessary to see them as individual governments with individual policies and political cultures.

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Rejecting the cliche about weak identity and underdeveloped nationalism, Bekus argues for the co-existence of two parallel concepts of Belarusianness - the official and the alternative one - which mirrors the current state of the Belarusian people more accurately and allows for a different interpretation of the interconnection between the democratization and nationalization of Belarusian society. The book describes how the ethno-symbolic nation of the Belarusian nationalists, based on the cultural capital of the Golden Age of the Belarusian past (17th century) competes with the nation - institutionalized and reified by the numerous civic rituals and social practices under the auspices of the actual Belarusian state. Comparing the two concepts not only provides understanding of the logic that dominates Belarusian society's self-description models, but also enables us to evaluate the chances of alternative Belarusianness to win this unequal struggle over identity. ... Read more

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"At a time when nuclear proliferation is becoming an increasingly ominous threat to global stability, Mitchell Reiss's book provides the much-needed perspective. Thoroughly researched, systematic and probing in analysis, and significant in its conclusions." -- Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser, 1977-1981

"Judiciously lays out the wins and draws of recent nonproliferation efforts, drawing our attention to the good policies and good fortune that can play a role in this struggle." -- S.S. Hecker, Director, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

"Matching a critical eye with meticulous research, Reiss slices through diplomatic smokescreens and uncovers a wealth of new information about nuclear programs in nine countries." -- Leslie H. Gelb, President, Council on Foreign Relations.

"A thought-provoking work -- one that offers some useful balm to the fevered discourse over nuclear proliferation... A valuable and well-written reminder that in fighting the world's fight we cannot ignore our occasional clear and even partial successes." -- R. James Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence, 1992-1995

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A comprehensive look at Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.Photographs throughout.CONTENTS:Introduction.RUSSIAN FEDERATION:The Land and the People; History; Communist Era; Stalin's Cultural Counter-Revolution of the 1930s; The Post-Stalin Era; The Brezhnev Era; Government Transition; The Gorbachëv Era; An Independent Russia is Born; The Putin Presidency; Foreign Policy; Government of the Russian Federation; Constitution of the Russian Federation; Culture; The Changing Economy.THE COMMONWEALTH OF THE INDEPENDENT STATES:Collapse of the Soviet Union; Commonwealth of Independent States; Economy under the CIS; Some Regional Problems of the CIS.WESTERN REPUBLICS:Belarus; Ukraine; Moldova.TRANSCAUCASIAN REPUBLICS:Armenia; Azerbaijan; Georgia.CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS:Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan; Tajikistan; Turkmenistan; Uzbekistan. Bibliography ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from New Internationalist, published by New Internationalist Magazine on June 1, 2009. The length of the article is 520 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: A pressing issue: Belarusian journalists 'gagged' by draconian censorship laws.(MEDIA)
Author: Riccardo Valsecchi
Publication: New Internationalist (Magazine/Journal)
Date: June 1, 2009
Publisher: New Internationalist Magazine
Issue: 423Page: 26(1)

Distributed by Gale, a part of Cengage Learning ... Read more

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This book explores how culture shapes foreign economic policy in post-Soviet states. After the Soviet empire fragmented, some of the newly emerged nations directed their economic activities primarily toward Russia and other former republics, while others turned sharply away from the Soviet bloc. Taking a constructivist approach, Andrei Tsygankov explains the striking variation by making the original argument that a new state's strength of national identity shapes its foreign economic policy. The stronger the identity, the more likely the new state was to shift away from the empire. Drawing on detailed case studies of Latvia, Ukraine, and Belarus, the author demonstrates how the Baltic nations, with a strong sense of identity, chose to deal with Russia and other ex-Soviet nations on a strictly bilateral basis and entered preferential arrangements with European countries. Ukraine, with moderate identity strength, pursued active economic relations with both Russia and Europe. Finally, Belarus, with a relatively weak identity, pursued an effort to reintegrate with Russia at the expense of developing ties with Europe. Employing a range of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, this study brings a national identity perspective into the forefront of international political economy theory. ... Read more

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The control of office has long been regarded as the key to understanding power and policy in the Soviet system. What, however, accounts for this control of office? Numerous conventional studies have addressed this question by focusing on the individuals who make up the Soviet elite at one time or another.This book adopts a different perspective by treating the personnel system itself as a set of power relations that govern the mobility of the individuals within it.Using the Belorussian Republic as the site of the investigation, the author analyzes the movements of individuals as sequences of complex interrelations structured by the system.He demonstrates how regionalism has played an important role and patronage the decisive role in shaping the patterns of elite circulation in Belorussia, and outlines changes in these same patterns following the advent of the Gorbachev leadership, changes that were anticipated in some respects by events in Belorussia. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Number crunching in Belorussia
Urban collected and processed a lot of data for this book, and I have togive him credit for that, for sure.His objective is to create a rigid,mathematically based methodology for studying the movements in the Sovietbureaucracy, which by no means acted as a conventional bureaucracy, despitemany scholars' attempts to analyze it as such.Looking at Belorussia, hegathered data for office vacancies and mobility for twenty years, andplugged them into his "algebra" to calculate probabilities ofoffice-holders coming from particular areas of the bureaucracy, looking forpatterns.In this, he is quite thorough, and one really cannot doubt theextent and factuality of his research (although it doesn't make for easyreading).

His analysis, on the other hand, does not come out as solidlyas his data collection.Not that what he says did not hold true for theBelorussian republic, but he resists making generalizations from it,extending it to the soviet system as a whole.He also, in consideringfactionalism in Belorussia (actually one of the strongest sections of thebook) does tend to drop back into the subjective mode of analysis that hedecries in the book's introduction.

This is not an easy book to read.Astrong backing in statistics, some higher math, and a good workingknowledge of Russia between Brezhnev and Gorbachev is almost necessary. But with all its faults aside, Urban has created a useful methodology forstudy of the movements of power in the late soviet period. ... Read more